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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#361

Post by byzantinegene »

lukan wrote: post #159
lsy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re…

"You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it" But it seems we are heading there. For simple stuff, if I made a very clear spec - I can be almost sure, that every time I give that prompt to a AI, it will work without error, using the same algorithms. So quality of prompt is more valuable, than the generated code So either way, this is what I focus my thin…

your spec is a guideline, not something the LLM has to adhere to. it is definitely not guaranteed to work without error

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#362

Post by kubb »

luckystarr wrote: post #133

The way I use AI now feels more exhausting than the programming I did for the last 20 years. I pose a problem, then evaluate proposals, then pick the one I think is the "right one"(tm), then see the AI propose a bunch of weird shit, then call it out, refine the proposal until it feels just about right (this is the exhausting part), then let it code the proposal. The coding will then run for 1-5 hours and produce some…

How do you check if what it produced is even the right thing? Models love to go chasing the wrong goal based on a reasonable spec.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#363

Post by anygivnthursday »

pkphilip wrote: post #355

Just as the advent of palm-sized organizers reduced our ability to recall dozens and sometimes even 100s of phone numbers of friends etc, AI will reduce our ability to perform a range of functions. I think the evidence for this is quite clear. Humans are NOT going to expend any energy - even mental energy, to think about something if they don't have to.

Or Google Maps our ability to navigate when GPS signal is lost

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#364

Post by pityJuke »

netcan wrote: post #351
rimliu wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.

A lot of paraimony between your statement and Socrates' comments on the transition to writing. Interestingly, he placed a lot of importance on memory... where you emphasize manipulation of concepts.

I’ve grown to appreciate this aspect of standard examination as I’ve gotten older. Everyone wants to say “oh, you can just look it up now”, but how can you come up with higher level thinking, when you don’t have the fundamentals in your mind?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#365

Post by anygivnthursday »

pona-a wrote: post #296
p_stuart82 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the thing is it doesn't even feel like mortgaging. shipping, features going out, everything looks fine. then something breaks and you realize you can't debug your own code without asking the model again.

It feels like an addiction. Normal coding requires sustained attention, you can sense how deep you are in the progress and when you're too tired to continue, but with LLMs the next feature always feels like another prompt away, having sessions go well into the early morning/late-night. You rationalize you can quit, that you've been reading the source and each diff enough to "understand" the codebase. But the truth is…

It also feels like another nail into the coffin for our attention. Smart phones, IM, notifications and new media has already destroyed a good deal of it, AI seems to be doing that to coding. Do more, faster, just ask the AI, dont spend your time on this or that, you can in the meantime switch your attention elsewhere, maybe to another AI, quick.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#366

Post by kakacik »

netcan wrote: post #318
nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

Yeah but where comparison with philosophy falls short is - if we lost some ways of thinking, it was gradual and most didn't notice.

Software code is on the other hand extremely formal, and either it works perfectly as intended, it works crappily and keeps breaking in various edge cases or just doesn't work (last 2 are just variants of same dysfunctionality, technically its binary state). There is no scenario where broken code somehow ends up working and delivering, or maybe 1 in trillion, sometimes.

Also the change is so fast that the failure is immediately obvious to everybody, its not gradual change of thinking over few decades/generations.

LLMs are getting impressive, but anybody claiming there is no massive long term harm to getting to what we call now proper seniority is... don't know, delusional, junior who never walked that long and hard-won path, doing PR for llms at all costs or some other similar type. Or simply has some narrow use case working great for them long term which definitely can't be transferred on whole industry, like 1-man indie game dev.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#367

Post by annjose »

wasabinator wrote: post #284

Is anyone tired of being told what AI is supposed to mean for the individual? As a software guy it's supposed to mean I am now a team lead of sorts. However all the people I see crowing about this never sought to become team leads in their career, nor did I. Yet now suddenly everyone is supposed to want to become a team lead of sorts (ie. the agents becoming your team). I don't want to do that, I treat an AI agent as…

I don't understand why people crave to assign a new role for themselves (team lead, manager). AI is a tool that augments your skill and you use it carefully. It doesn't require a change in your role. A farmer with a tractor is a farmer, not a lead. An accountant with spreadsheets is an accountant. A software engineer using a coding agent is a software engineer who has a powerful tool in their toolbox.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#368

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

phito wrote: post #348
rimliu wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.

It's true for all automation we do get more comfort. We build systems so that we humans have as little struggle as possible, not realising that struggle is the only reason for existence. By eliminating it, we are erasing ourselves from this world.

This kind of argument flies in the face of the fact that plenty of inherited rich people seem to lead very happy lives. Of course, they do find things to struggle with, but it's much more pleasant to struggle to score 72 at the golf course or to outbid a rival for a piece of contemporary art than to struggle for basic needs.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#370

Post by ohNoe5 »

rimliu wrote: post #335
netcan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.

We will never fundamentally get rid of thinking; it's coupled to navigation of 3D reality we live

And we don't need words to think; cognitive problem solving and language processing are separate processes [1]

We will shift the problems we need to think about. Same as always; humanity isn't really solving building stone pyramids. Did we stop thinking? No just thought about a different todo list.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...

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